New insights into how immunity evolves could help scientists protect all flora and fauna of the world from disease
Vilde Leipart is a researcher at the University of Life Sciences, Norway, Ås. She shares the story of the Alphafold.
I feel a strong need to protect bees.
Bees are extremely crucial to our culture and economy, but most importantly, they are very crucial to our ecosystem. The survival of many species depends on them as pollinators. However, worldwide, bee populations are rapidly decreasing due to environmental factors and human interference.
To increase the chances of survival, the basics of the bee’s immune system must be studied. My area of interest is vitelogenin, a protein that can be found in almost any animal that lays eggs. It supports breeding, but also appears to play other roles, such as regulating immunity and feeding behavior.
Vitelogenin binds to pathogen proteins such as antibodies and can contribute to immunity passed on in egg-soaked species. Bacteria, fungi, or virus fragments ingested by the mother, or by the Queen, are transferred to the development of eggs that cause immunity to the developing embryo. This “transgenerational immune priming” is key to increasing the survival of honeybees and many other species in an infectious disease-filled world.
The Lamprey Vitellogenin was modeled in the late 1990s using X-ray crystallography. However, until now, little has been known about the structure of the honeybee version, mainly because it is so large. So we started using Alphafold to understand that.
As vitelogenin appears to play many roles, we wanted to visualize function-specific domains, see how they interact, and predict different functions based on the structure revealed by Alphafold. I learned a lot from the structures that Alphafold created. I spent hours staring at it. I’m still learning! We were able to see how the full length of the protein is assembled, connected, and how the protein subunits interact. What’s important is how quickly I was able to do it. It took me two days to do what might have taken years.
This work also has a broader meaning. Egg sales species include tree frogs, chickens, crocodiles, ghost sharks and turtles. They all make vitelogenin and are all vulnerable to a variety of infectious diseases. Understanding its basic function in honeybees can reveal what it does in other animals, and through it can help protect vulnerable wild species and domestic livestock from infectious diseases and pesticides.
I love studying bees and hope this research will lead to new ways to protect this species and other species. I live and work in Norway. Here, fish and fishing are truly important to our culture and economy. Fish, particularly commercially agricultural fish, are vulnerable to disease outbreaks, and we would like to expand our research to tackle salmon vitelogenin.
This work, made possible by Alphafold, influences such a wide range of species and scenarios. It’s really exciting.
